The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (14 page)

26

A couple days after Cody Schronert was shuffled off to jail, I came into the office after a track meet and headed to my desk to type up my story. A better one was already brewing in the newsroom. Sam Landry caught me coming in the door and filled me in.

“Ace Schronert is suing that guy you talked to, that gun-nut homeowner.”

“Why?”

“Emotional trauma and distress, he says. He filed a suit saying that the guy—what’s his name? Bisquick or something?—”

“Bispuppo.”

“Right. Yeah, anyway, Schronert says that when the guy used that machine gun or whatever, he inflicted emotional distress on his kid. Suing him for three-hundred grand. Can you believe that?”

It was all too easy to believe, sadly, but that didn’t do much to short-circuit the anger I felt rising in me. Artie Bispuppo didn’t strike me as the most rational son of a bitch in the world, but he was a decent guy wh
o’d
done what all of us wish we could do to a petty criminal. H
e’d
caught them in the act and brought humiliating justice raining down. Now Ace Schronert, every bit the thug case his son was, was looking to make a quick buck off him.

“Who’s writing the Sunday column?” I asked. A prime piece of the biggest sports section of the week went to the
Herald-Gleaner
’s sportswriters in a rotation—a full length-of-the-page strip of newsprint to make our case for something. All I knew was that I didn’t have the duty this weekend, but now I damn sure wanted it.

“Raymont, I think,” Landry said.

I went across the room and settled into my chair.

“Hop,” I said to Raymont. “What are you writing this week?”

He took off his headphones. The guy listened to Johnny Cash continually while at work. Better than listening to Trimear, I supposed.

“I don’t know, Mark. Maybe something on the redistricting in Class C.”

“Can I take your spot?”

Raymont looked relieved by the request. One more thing he wouldn’t have to do. He nodded at Trimear at the adjacent desk, across from me. “Ask Gene.”

“Gene?” I said.

“I’m more interested in your story tonight.” He glanced at the clock above my head. “Getting late.”

“Fifteen minutes and it’s yours,” I said. “Can I have the spot?”

He sighed. His head bobbed on that spastic neck of his. “Sure.”

I turned my track story around in twelve minutes, a story
I’d
written a thousand times before. Only the names and the numbers change. Once I got the all-clear from Trimear that it was on the page, I set to writing the Sunday column that Raymont had gracefully ceded to me, and I zeroed in on my targets: Case “the Ace” Schronert and his boy, Cody.

Before I commenced with ripping, I considered whether I ought to acknowledge that Cody Schronert and I had some history, a past that informed how I viewed him and gave me all the reason I ever needed to consider him a mindless little punk. A few years earlier, when he was still attending Billings Senior,
I’d
been at a practice to talk to Mack Hargroves, the football coach, for a story on the prevalence of wing-T offenses in the state. I remember that specifically because we were talking about Schronert—Hargroves going on expansively, the way he tended to, and me with my head buried in my notebook, taking down his dripping bits of wisdom—when a thrown football hit me in the back of the head. I wheeled around, dumbfounded, while Hargroves fetched the ball, pitched it back, and said, “You guys be careful now.” I looked at the group of kids, and there was Cody Schronert, staring at me with this shit-eating grin on his face.

I turned back to Hargroves and tried to pick up our conversational thread, and bam—I’m hit again, behind the knees.

This time, Hargroves was pissed. “Damn it, Cody, I told you to be careful.” I stared at the kid, and he just looked back at me, that grin never leaving his face. I knew. He knew I knew. And he didn’t give a good goddamn.

It bothered me. It still bothers me. I took it because—here’s that conditioning thing again—that’s what I do. I’m not the story, and I don’t intend to become the story by amping up a tense situation. I’ve had athletes stand as close as possible to me, lean in, breathe on me, and tell me I’m shit. Scream at me. It happens to all of us, eventually. In every case, I just delivered my words a little flatter, a little more monotone, a little quieter. I’m not the story.

But I’m also not some punk-ass kid’s plaything.

I wondered if I should acknowledge, in print, that I hated Cody Schronert. And then I decided the hell with it. If I wrote this thing the way I intended, ther
e’d
be little doubt about my feelings on the matter of Cody or his bottom-feeding daddy.

27

If I’m going to call Gene Trimear a ham-handed hack—and I am, because he is—then I also have to give him credit where it’s due. He wrote a corker of a headline for my Sunday column. Everything else related to it turned out to be a disaster, of course, but the headline was a thing of beauty.

A Dummy and His Dad: Misadventures of Cody, Case Schronert

By MARK WESTERLY

Herald-Gleaner Staff

If you’re looking for a good example of the difference between class and crass in sports today—indeed, in any walk of life—you could do no better than one right here in Billings.

Back in February, we all got quite a jolt when Cody Schronert, a former Billings Senior High School running back, beat Olympic hero Hugo Hunter in a boxing match at the Babcock Theatre. Hunter hasn’t fought since, and it seems a better-than-even bet that he never will again.

But let’s take a look at where those two are today:

Cody Schronert, 21, sits under house arrest, charged in a three-day vandalism spree that did wide property damage across Billings and gripped the city in fear.

Hugo Hunter, 37—and believe me, that 37 matters, as the 21-year-old version of him would have had no problems with the likes of Cody Schronert—can be found most any night of the week at Feeney’s, the pub owned by his former manager, Frank Feeney, where he entertains diners with tales of his life in the ring.

Affable despite a career’s worth of heartache and a fortune lost, Hunter has the good sense to know that he was given an athletic gift, and though he certainly squandered some of his opportunities along the way, he is proud of what he’s done and willing to share it with the people of this city he loves.

Cody Schronert has never wanted for anything. He was a child of privilege and is now a man of low character—and that’s true regardless of whether he’s found guilty of the crimes with which he’s charged.

He’s a bad apple. And if you want to know why, look at the tree.

Schronert’s father, Case “the Ace” Schronert, is this city’s most aggressive personal-injury attorney. If you see an ambulance in Billings, you’re unlikely to have to look long before you see Case Schronert’s Mercedes in tow, chasing down another payday. It’s hard to move around this town without seeing one of his billboards. And that’s fine, as far as it goes. It takes all kinds to make a society, and Case Schronert is happy to be a bottom-feeder, so we’re probably all better off letting him be just that. I suspect we can all agree that it’s a little unseemly to profit from others’ misery, but if this guy weren’t doing it, no doubt someone else would.

The problem is when Case Schronert flexes his ill-formed legal muscles on behalf of his immature son, and in so doing targets someone who is a productive member of our society.

By now, you’ve surely read about Case Schronert’s $300,000 lawsuit against Artie Bispuppo, the Billings homeowner who brought Cody Schronert and his accomplices (alleged) to justice with his own legally purchased and legally fired gun. If that lawsuit doesn’t make you sick, on a basic level, then I don’t want to know you.

Let’s be clear: Artie Bispuppo did what any of us would have done under similar circumstances. Have you ever come out of a store to find your car keyed by some miscreant? What did you say to yourself when that happened? Oh, if
I’d
only been there. Yes. It’s what we all want: to hold someone accountable for his bad acts.

That’s what Artie Bispuppo did. This city ought to celebrate him for it.

Instead, Case Schronert wants to take $300,000 from him. For inflicting “emotional distress” on his conscience-less son.

It’s a travesty.

As for Cody Schronert,
I’d
suggest an immediate change of behavior and an infusion of humility and grace.

If he needs lessons, he can wander down to Feeney’s and consult with Hugo Hunter.

After the case is resolved, of course. Until then, he can’t leave the house.

Billings has never been so fortunate.

I’ll cop to it: that last line gave me pause. Even for a bona fide critic of Cody Schronert, which I certainly was, it seemed a bit of undue celebration of someone else’s bad circumstance. In the end, I left it for two reasons. First, I wasn’t able to achieve objectivity where the Schronerts were concerned (interestingly enough, a point the Diploma would soon be making to me). Second, I figured if it struck Trimear badly, h
e’d
just cleave it out of there. H
e’d
certainly had no previous compunction about manhandling my work.

The morning the column hit the streets, my phone started ringing, and it didn’t stop for more than a few minutes until early afternoon. Lainie came over with a box of doughnuts and coffee, and then she let me take her in the bedroom and do as I would—not a bad way to mark a Sunday morning. My e-mail in-box was jumping, too. The only dissent came from Case Schronert, who suggested, in a way that was just lawyerly enough to not be construed as an overt threat, that he would even things up. The key phrase he used was “assassination of character,” and let me tell you, it was no easy trick to keep myself from making an observation about needing the presence of character first.

About the only person I didn’t hear from was the Diploma, and that’s how I knew
I’d
landed myself in a spot of trouble.

It was worth it.

Sure enough, just before noon on Monday I was summoned to the
Herald-Gleaner
for a chat with the Diploma and managing editor Mike “the Drone” Lindell. The Diploma’s response was a terse “no” when I asked if Trimear would be there, and strange as it sounds, that scared me as much as anything. Trimear was a mostly useless human being, but he did have some value in explaining to overly curious executives just what it was that the sports department did, our rituals and idiosyncrasies.
I’d
lost count of the number of people wh
o’d
occupied the Diploma’s office and wanted, among their first acts, to abolish the annual NCAA basketball tournament pool. Something happens to a journalist when he’s elevated into executive-level leadership: it’s as if he forgets all the irreverent humor and grab-ass that goes on in a newsroom and suddenly wants to run the place like a damned bank. Trimear had talked a succession of executives out of acts that would have obliterated morale even more than the general tenor of the business was already managing to do. I probably should have been more grateful for that.

The Diploma sat in his chair and leaned way back, like Ali on the ropes against Foreman in Zaire, his undergrad and graduate sheepskins framing his head and supplying his nickname. The Drone sat in the chair next to mine, an uncomfortable proximity.

“We’ve had to mitigate a lot of damage from your column,” Pennington said.

In the queasy car ride to the office, the topic of the talk had seemed bluntly obvious, so I gave myself no credit for insight.
I’d
used my driving time to imagine the Diploma’s openers and what my responses might be, and this one, it turned out, called for mockery.

“It’s unusual to hear the truth equated to damage,” I said.

“Oh, spare me,” the Diploma said, only his even delivery didn’t betray the slightest bit of irritation, which was too bad. “There’s a way to deliver the truth, as you call it, without being offensive, and without calling one of the most prominent people in town names—”

“Prominent?”

“—and a major advertiser, to boot.”

I started in again. “Ah, yes, advertiser. Now—”

“That column was not to the standard we expect,” Lindell said, and I swear to God, I wanted to lean over and puke on his shoes. I didn’t like Pennington, but I respected him. I respected his intellect and, usually, his manner, even if his sensibilities sat in direct opposition to mine. But Lindell? The worst copy editor I’ve ever seen—certainly the worst on the
Herald-Gleaner
desk—had risen to the number-two newsroom job mostly because nobody else wanted it, or wanted to carry water for the Diploma. Let me put it this way: Gene Trimear had more managerial bona fides in his short, fat, nicotine-tinged fingers than Mike Lindell had in his entire soulless body.

I scrambled to get my footing. “OK, Bill, look: I didn’t call anybody any names.”

The Diploma stared back at me, incredulous. “A dummy and his dad?
I’d
say your lack of objectivity about the Schronerts shines through.”

“That was the headline,” I protested, and immediately I wished
I’d
seized on the Diploma’s incantation of “objectivity,” which shouldn’t be a factor, as opinions are all about subjectivity. “I didn’t write that. Talk to Trimear.”

Lindell again: “We have.”

“Well, OK,” I said.

The Diploma leaned forward, his hands on his desk. “Look, Mark, we’re going to cut to the chase here, as it’s already been decided. This is a serious incident, but you’ve been a good employee for a lot of years—”

“Meaning you can’t find the juice to fire me,” I said.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t be too sure about my juice, as you put it. As I was saying, you’ve been a good employee, which means I hope this episode is an outlier. We’ve managed to set things right with Mr. Schronert, the column has been expunged both online and in our in-house library, and we’ll be sitting you down without pay for five days. At the end of that time, you can report back to work.”

He stopped there, looking at me, trying to suss out my reaction. I sensed there was more he wished to say, and I wanted him to just get on with it.

“OK,” I said.

“OK,” he said. “When you come back, there will be no more columns, at least not for a while. You can still cover regular sports news, but no more in-print opinions until I’m certain you’re ready. That’s up to me.”

“The buck stops with you,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“Starting now.”

I fought with myself not to smile, as I surely wanted to at my tweaking of authority, like a good journalist. Instead, my face heated up as I watched the Diploma choke down my last flinging bit of insolence.

“You may start your five days away now,” he said.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “We have editors here, right? Gene could have stopped this column. Hell, you could have, too.”

“Gene’s been disciplined. That’s between us and him. And we will be reassessing our protocols for columns from now on. Thank you for pointing that out.”

Lindell saw another opening to toss in a useless remark. “That’s it, Mark,” he said.

I got up and surprised Pennington by offering a handshake. He took my hand, a good, solid grip, and gave it two quick shakes and then let go. Lindell looked at me as if he wanted one, too, but I wasn’t inclined to oblige. If my time was now my own, I figured
I’d
spend it sidled up to one of Frank Feeney’s beer mugs.